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Timothy Murphy
Timothy Murphy (born 1951) is an American poet, farmer, and businessman. Life Murphy was born in Hibbing, Minnesota. Murphy studied at Yale University under Robert Penn Warren, graduating with a B.A. as Scholar of the House in Poetry in 1972. However, Warren advised Murphy against an academic career, urging him instead to return to the "rich soil" of his rural roots. Murphy returned to Minnesota, and subsequently became involved in several farming and manufacturing enterprises in North Dakota, experiences which are reflected in his later writing. Murphy published his first full-length collection of poetry, The Deed Of Gift, in 1998; the collection represents all of Murphy's work as a poet through about 1996. Murphy's second collection, Very Far North, was published in 2002. Murphy has also published Set the Ploughshare Deep: A Prairie Memoir (2000), and a translation of Beowulf (2004) with his partner, Alan Sullivan. The Lewis and Clark Foundation's Dakota Institute Press will be publishing a double volume of Murphy's poems, Mortal Stakes and Faint Thunder. In addition they will publish Hunter's Log, a collection of Murphy's hunting poems illustrated by Eldridge Hardie. Writing Murphy's 2 earliest collections of poetry were widely reviewed. His work was compared to that of Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and Richard Wilbur, and Wilbur himself described Murphy as "a mature and greatly accomplished poet." (collected reviews) In a contemporary review of The Deed Of Gift, Gerry Cambridge summarized Murphy's accomplishment: "There are outstanding poems here, including ‘Harvest of Sorrows’, ‘Sunset at the Getty’, and ‘The Quarrel’, as well as a great number of very likeable, individual, and tautly-made pieces. It would be hard to confuse Murphy with any other contemporary poet. No one else writing poetry in English sounds quite like him." As poet Dick Davis has noted, this distinctive style owes much to Murphy's use of traditional meter and rhyme, unusual among poets today: "His poems are wholly his own, and yet the voice in them lives in and through his mastery of traditional metre, which is so thorough as to seem indivisible from the poems’ sensibility and meaning." This focus on rhyme and meter is exemplified in the following excerpt from "Harvest of Sorrows": }} Writing of Murphy's 2nd collection, Very Far North, critic Stephen Burt says, "When Murphy sounds bad, he sounds obviously bad, like bad late Frost — but his good poems are poems Frost, or Jonson, might have admired." Publications Poetry *''The Ant Lion'' (chapbook). Edgewood, KY: R.L. Barth, 1996. *''Bedrock'' (chapbook). West Chester, PA: Aralia Press, 1998. *''The Deed of Gift'' (with introduction by Richard Wilbur). Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 1998. ISBN 1-885266-62-6 *''Tessie's Time: New poem''. Tuscaloosa, AL: Fameorshame Press, 1999. *''Very Far North'' (with foreword by Anthony Hecht). London: Waywiser Press, 2002; Between the Lines, 2002. ISBN 1-904130-01-1 *''Hunter's Log: Field notes, 1998-2011''. Washburn, ND: Dakota Institute Press, 2011. *''Mortal Stakes / Faint Thunder: New poems, 2002-2009''. Washburn, ND: Dakota Institute Press, 2011. Non-fiction *''Set the Ploughshare Deep: A prairie memoir''. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0-8214-1321-0 Translated *''Beowulf'' (translated with Alan Sullivan; edited by Sarah Anderson). New York: Pearson / Longman, 2004. ISBN 0-321-10720-9 Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Timothy Murphy, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Oct. 31, 2015. See also *List of U.S. poets References Notes External links *"Mentor" at Poetry 180 *"The Track of the Storm" *Prayer for Sobriety at [http://www.the-chimaera.com/ The Chimaera] *Timothy Murphy at the Poetry Foundation *The Seven: Poem sequence in The Flea. *Links to 20 of Murphy's poems at The Poem Tree ;Audio / video *Timothy Murphy at YouTube *Webcast of Murphy reading at Bookfest 2004, at Library of Congress website; RealPlayer format, 24 minutes. *February 2010 podcast of Murphy reading recent poems as part of "Distinguished Performance" series on Eratosphere Poetry board; MP3 format, approximately 40 minutes. *"Tim Murphy in His Own Words" Interview with Rob Godfrey, recorded for localradio.fr, February 2010; MP3 format, approximately 35 minutes. ;About * Biography and links to about a dozen of Murphy's poems. *Interview, tributes and poems at II. Category:1951 births Category:Living people Category:People from Hibbing, Minnesota Category:American poets Category:Yale University alumni Category:Writers from Minnesota Category:LGBT writers from the United States Category:Gay writers Category:21st-century poets Category:English-language poets Category:Formalist poets Category:Poets Category:American farmers Category:20th-century poets